If you fear something you don’t believe in, does it mean you believe in it at least a little bit?
I’m mostly referring to my interest in the paranormal.
Let me start by saying I am 100 percent atheist in that I don’t believe in the existence of any deities. But does being an atheist have to dictate other beliefs?
When it comes to my interest in the paranormal there’s a lot to unpack. Due to having schizoaffective disorder, I’ve spent much of my life struggling with psychosis. My psychotic symptoms included auditory and visual hallucinations that I referred to as “ghosts”. They left me frightened and confused.
It was actually after antipsychotic medication successfully curbed my hallucinations in my 20s that I declared myself an atheist – something I consider a huge personal achievement. It was at that point I knew dead people weren’t haunting me. It had been my only tie to spirituality.
But what if there’s something else? What if there’s another explanation for ghosts? I don’t mean my hallucinations, but things other people have claimed to have experienced. I know not everyone’s crazy.
Every night I go to bed and lay on my side facing the closet. I look at the dark closet and fear someone or something will be peeking back out at me. The fear is in the back of my mind. It’s not enough to keep me from sleeping but sometimes it’s enough for me to roll onto my other side.
What’s even creepier is that the organization I work for is talking about renting space in a very well-known haunted location here in Toledo. Everyone has a creepy story about this place, and quite frankly, I’m a little scared.
If the fear is there, does that mean I believe in it?
I don’t believe in dead people roaming around, but I do believe there’s something to it – something unexplained.
Most other areas of my life are pretty cut and dry.
Do you ever feel like there’s an area of your life that’s murky? Like you just don’t know enough about it yet?
How do you guys feel about karma? Oh, how I wish karma was real! It makes sense to me that if you’re negative you will attract negativity, but of course, there’s no evidence for karma either. I could see how that could be a murky area for people as well.
How do you guys feel? If you’re an atheist are there beliefs in your life that feel murky or just unexplained? Do you feel being an atheist has to dictate other beliefs than just the nonexistence of deities? I really want to hear your stories and feedback.
If the fear is there, does that mean I believe in it?
Not really. It just means there’s a certain part of your brain/mind/consciousness that runs those thoughts over and over; but that doesn’t mean “you,” the whole conscious person, believes any of it to be real. It’s like watching a horror movie and being troubled, at some level, by what you saw, and unable to sleep that night, even though you know unequivocally that it’s all fiction.
…Everyone has a creepy story about this place, and quite frankly, I’m a little scared.
What sort of stories, exactly? Stories of actual things happening, or just people getting creepy feelings when they’re in or near that house? And where do they come from?
“If you fear something you don’t believe in, does it mean you believe in it at least a little bit?”
What Wittgenstein called “language games”.
No, it does not, in the literal sense.
You cannot both not believe in something and also believe in that something.
(Most of our logic includes the law of non-contradiction)
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“Let me start by saying I am 100 percent atheist in that I don’t believe in the existence of any deities. But does being an atheist have to dictate other beliefs?”
Only that those beliefs do not rely on a prior belief in a personal deity.
To elaborate, in the most literal sense ‘atheist’ is basically a term where the ‘a-‘ privative prefix is applied to the stem ‘theist’ — and theism is belief in a personal god. There are many other varieties of goddish belief to which the overall term ‘theism applies in the broader sense — deism, polytheism, pantheism, etc.
Animism, at a stretch.
Anyway, point is that, unless one believes in at least one deity, they can be considered ‘theist’ in the broader sense, and so a-theist (‘atheist’) just means not a theist.
Most saliently, being a privative concept (that is, the lack of if), it only entails disregard for that concept and any concept itself based upon it.
Introduces nothing new, though there’s a school of thought (A+) that holds that given the lack of god(s), the best we can do is humanism as a social and life philosophy, and that any good person should therefore work towards that goal.
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“But what if there’s something else? What if there’s another explanation for ghosts? I don’t mean my hallucinations, but things other people have claimed to have experienced. I know not everyone’s crazy.”
If the phenomena are real, then they are amenable to scientific observation and experimentation.
That’s been tried for over a century, nothing has ever come of it.
Therefore, if it in fact is the case that paranormal or supernatural occurrences occur, they work just as the Masquerade does.
(https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Masquerade)
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“Do you ever feel like there’s an area of your life that’s murky? Like you just don’t know enough about it yet?”
No. Admittedly, I don’t routinely and self-consciously examine every area of my life.
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Sorry to hear that. I kinda had times like that when I was rather young.
Suggention: surely you can change the circumstances?
The layout, the location, whatever. Something.
You are in control. You can try more than once.
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To be bluntly honest, I like the concept, but I think it’s just wishful thinking.
Anyway — a good person should not need to fear the consequences of bad deeds or seek reward in doing good deeds to be a good person.
My philosophy: be as good a person as you know how to be based on what you know about the real world. Pretty simple, pretty specific, and yes it could go wrong. But I like it as a baseline.
PS Pretty sure I brought up the concept of ‘alief’ here before.
(Regarding the issue of belief and the nuances of it)
Do I believe in ghosts? No. Do I get easily scared? Yes. I’m not about to prove how not-scared I am of ghosts by spending the night in pitch darkness in a haunted house, if only because it invites all sorts of pranks that would be legitimately frightening on top of all the mundane things I would be scared of.
If someone’s giving you grief about that meaning you actually believe in ghosts, don’t pay them any mind. Ask for evidence — they’ll come up empty-handed as usual.
You can fear something without any rational basis. I’m viscerally terrified of spiders. Intellectually, I think they’re beautiful, fascinating creatures, with many things to recommend them. And obviously, they do exist. What doesn’t exist is a reason to fear them the way I do, to the point that when I unexpectedly encountered a decent sized specimen in my shower one morning about 20 years ago, I literally passed out. It’s not something amenable to rational thought. Similarly if you’re afraid of something, irrationally, I don’t think you should read much into it. It’s a mildly diverting feature of consciousness that we have these quirks. It doesn’t mean your atheism is impure or hypocritical or anything.
It doesn’t have to. But if you think about it clearly, it kind of should. Given that there’s no god, then all the rules people follow simply because their imaginary friend told a bronze age primitive to follow them, and that bronze age primitive wrote it down in a book – all those rules you can ignore. It does mean you kind of have to develop your own set of rules – or follow the obviously sensible ones like don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t start a land war in Asia. You should believe all people are equal, and treat them as such. You should eat anything you like, pretty much – none of that “no bacon” nonsense, unless you’re going veggie. And so on.
Oh come on. Ten minutes on the internet should convince you that, one way or the other, everyone – every single human being drawing breath – is crazy. Not in your specific way, maybe. But trust me – it’s not that you’re not the only one who’s crazy. It’s that if you weren’t, you would be the only one.
It isn’t haunted.
It really is as simple as that. And if someone tells you it is, you can either say out loud or in your head “oh grow up, you fucking stupid gullible child”. THERE ARE NO HAUNTED HOUSES. It’s not a matter of opinion, or faith, or belief. It’s settled, as settled as the fact the earth is a sphere. Just because some morons persist in beleiving otherwise, and worse, talking about it, doens’t change the settled fact.
I need to trot out this link again: https://xkcd.com/1235/
It means you’re allowing other people’s idiocy to cloud your judgement. If someone told you black people were zombies, say – would you believe that? Would it make you afraid of black people? I’m hoping the answer is “no, that’s fucking stupid and actually the very suggestion makes me angry”. Well – same with ghosts.
I’d say that applies to most of my life. The thing is – I’m comfortable with that ignorance. I don’t fear it. You can shine a light on the things you’re unsure of, but that will make other areas darker. But there’s nothing in the dark to be afraid of, any more than there’s a balrog in the cellar, or whatever.
Paraglider pilots talk a lot about karma. A bunch of times when I’ve been unable to fly, or when I’ve had a bad day and landed early, I’ve driven out the middle of nowhere to pick up mates who’ve landed out after flying cross country. I’ve helped out beginners with advice and information. I’ve organised competitions. And the universe had repaid this, in that I’ve landed out many times after long flights, stuck out my thumb at the side of the road, and lovely people have driven me closer to where I left my car.
Now: the events are entirely unconnected, and karma is a fictional concept. But I still talk about it, because it makes me feel good about doing good, and feel happy about having good done for me. It’s not a real thing, it’s a mental tool.
It depends. How hard do you want to think? You can just think “hah, there’s no gods”, and leave it there. Bit shallow. Or you can think “huh, no gods. What does that mean?”. And this kind of ought to lead you down the SJW route (in a good way). Amazon-using-hypocrite PZM at Pharyngula spent a good deal of time a while back going on about how just being godless isn’t an achievement, and how the realisation should lead one’s thought in the direction of social justice generally – it was good stuff. The whole Atheism+ thing withered on the vine though, partly because some of the most vocal publicly atheist figures seemed to be in it mainly for reasons of self-promotion and the chance to feel good about themselves and make a wad of cash for ridiculing and debunking religious nutjobs. And ridiculing and debunking religious nutjobs is undoubtedly and unarguably fun and does give you a little jolt of serotonin or dopamine or something… but it’s not a life, not for most of us. And if your atheism is to be useful, it needs to inform your life.
One of the ways it informs my life is becoming comfortable – REALLY comfortable – with ignorance. I went off on one a few years ago talking about science with my stepbrother’s kids. They were asking me about space, and I talked to them about the fact that for most of my life, we didn’t know whether the universe was going to collapse on itself in a Big Crunch when the momentum of the Big Bang ran out, or whether expansion would continue forever, slowing gently but never stopping. Then I told that that I was comfortably in my thirties before we found out neither of those things is an option, because the expansion is accelerating, and although we’ve given the reason a name – “dark energy” – that is literally all we’ve done and we have no fucking idea why. And I’m good with that. We’ve discovered whole phyla of life in just the last couple of decades, which is like living on earth for centuries and not spotting there’s such a thing as vertebrates. Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed or afraid of. Embrace it.
Do i think things are murky?
Yeah..
Does that negate the logical side of my mind that works out the probabilities and says, yeah, this probly ain’t real or okay this is something to genuinely worry about?
Nah.
Well, mostly anyhow.
Humans aren’t rational. Our brains aren’t reliable. If we understand this and then admit this to ourselves and then acknowledge the reality of irrational fears and feelings but don’t let them dominate or control our thoughts knowing them to be irrational .. that help?
Dune’s litany aganst fear :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonescalante/2021/10/25/why-dunes-litany-against-fear-is-good-psychological-advice/?sh=11e067051d10
Seems to work here sometmes. For me, at least.
Not that I’m fully rational (whatever that means) nor prone to superstitions & fears & stuff myself – athough I have heard that being superstitious is very bad luck! 😉
American entertainment adores the paranormal. I grew up watching tv programs like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Door and In Search Of… with Leonard Nimoy. They all had stories about a lot of paranormal stuff like ghosts and UFOs and Bigfoot. Movies like Poltergeist and Ghost Ship and 13 Ghosts and others that told horror stories about angry ghosts. There are authors who specialize in the paranormal, and when I was a kid there were endless spooky books to read. As an adult, there are endless spooky books to read. I don’t believe in any of it, but I do find a good ghost story to be entertaining in the same way I enjoy a good mystery story or a good science fiction story.
Does that describe your life, too? If so, you’ve been soaking in the paranormal your whole life. If everyone in your town believes a part of town is haunted, that’s going to live in your head as well. Some people have superheros living in their head, some people have NASCAR living in their head, some people have (their version of) Jesus living in their head. You’re aware of what’s living in your head, so what’s your next step?
Another point: there are things that you can’t see or hear that might cause haunted feelings.
For example, low-frequency sound waves can’t be heard, but (when loud enough) can cause feelings of unease and fear.
Another thing that comes to mind was a haunted house story, where the culprit was carbon monoxide leaking from the gas lines causing hallucinations (presumably low enough levels that it didn’t also poison the people to death). This was back before the natural gas formulation as a utility was changed to remove carbon monoxide, of course, but it could happen with any carbon monoxide source.
There might be other chemicals that could have similar effects in very small amounts.
I’ve long had a problem with doctrinaire atheism because it incorporates a faith-based belief that there are no unknown unknowns – there is nothing beyond physical reality as we know it. So I watch for clues, any clues, that may be a door into one of those unknowns. Your fear is an acknowledgment that there may be unknowns. I think it’s rational. The alternative, to reject the possibility of the paranormal, is an act of faith.
Until and unless some explanation is offered I have no belief in the paranormal. I dont use faith as a means of anything. If you dont have evidence for a thing, Im not required to believe it could be real. Possibility is not the same as probability. Just because a thing might be possible doesnt make it probable. Faith is the excuse people give for believing in things when they have no good reason to. If there were good reasons to believe we wouldnt need faith. And as for my atheism, my atheism has no doctrine beyond I am not convinced in the existence of any gods. Same goes for boogeymen, ghosts, and goblins. Show me some evidence that they are real and I will believe, but not before then.
I’ve struggled with depression all my life. Depressed kid, teen, adult. Depression + job burnout pushed me to the point of being barely functional, before I saw my primary care doc, got a referral to a psychiatrist, and finally started treatment in my early 30s. At 63, I’m doing well, though it’s been a bumpy ride.
I remember, at the point where I sought help, being inundated with mental tsunamis of hopelessness and worthlessness. I’d struggled with waves of those feelings all my life, but the waves had gotten bigger and bigger, and progressed to tsunami size. And then the first psychotropic med kicked in and the hopelessness/worthlessness ocean dropped to swells. I remember thinking, oh, my, this is how normal people feel. It was an absolute shock. And yet, nothing external to me had changed. That wild ocean was a product of my own mind.
That started me on a path of gradually questioning everything I believed in life. (Talk therapy helped.) Atheism was one of the results of that questioning. Now, some 30 years later, I am comfortable saying that all my beliefs are provisional, and that’s okay. This is because they are filtered by my mind, as well as many of them relying on the current scientific understanding of the cosmos, our planet, and us. But I break my beliefs down into a few categories:
1–current scientific consensus. Yeah, it can and will change. I will adapt my beliefs accordingly.
2–normal personal experience. Motions of sun and moon (and yeah, those are backed by science, but more primal.) My husband loves me. Weather tends to behave certain ways in the area where I live. My relatively new car is likely to just start when I go out in the morning. My doctor and my vet are always overbooked. And so on.
3–people I know are likely to react in certain ways to stimuli, based on their personalities. This is total inference on my part, and can be quite wrong, but on the whole life tends to be better when I at least try to anticipate those reactions.
But there’s also a lot of stuff that I refuse to draw conclusions about. People finding a particular place spooky, or seeing glimpses of what they interpret as ghosts, are simply unexplained phenomena that involve the filtering of the human mind. Other people’s experiences of the supernatural are their experiences, again, filtered through their minds. I can’t explain them, they can’t be demonstrated to not be true, and so on. My default is to not share any judgment, but I’m not believing without more evidence than someone else’s mind-filtered experience.
I get hammered by deja vu all the time, it doesn’t affect anything in my life, and I ignore it. I refuse to watch “spooky” stuff, because it WILL mess up my dreams, and sleep is hard enough at 63. Not that I believe in any of it, but there is great artistry in the making of those films/shows to evoke the primal fear emotion, and I don’t want to experience that.
To be honest, I only care when someone else attempts to make legislation based on their experiences of the supernatural or beliefs in it. Those beliefs rarely make life better for anyone.
But, back to your original point: I have found that taking a much more provisional outlook on what I believe is true is far more comfortable. For the murky stuff, I simply don’t have to know, I don’t let it affect my life, and I don’t feel any need to put down other people’s experiences. We all experience life through the filters of our own minds. The human mind works shockingly well most of the time, given all the potential for less-than-optimum functioning. It’s better to accept that there will be murky stuff and celebrate that your mind works well most of the time.
To reject the possibility of the paranormal is definitely not an act of faith because it has been tested scientifically. We have a pretty good understanding of how the world works (at least at the human scale) and any paranormal event would need to use some force to act none of which can do what is claimed of the paranormal. And if you say that it is a new force, well either it is too weak to have already been detected in which case it cannot have any effect on us and the matter around us or it is not physical (whatever that means) and again it cannot have any effect on us or the matter around us.
So the best explanation for any paranormal event is our own brain which is excellent at making up stories to fill in any void that might exist in our understanding of some random event. Our own perception and interpretation are really unreliable which is why we need independent, objective and repeatable observations (science) before we can conclude anything. So until we can get those observations, paranormal is as logical as any religion (which is to say just invented bullshit).
I remember seeing a video with Sean Carroll talking about all this but I don’t have a link.
I feel like if anyone external to you were asking if having any kind of not-fully-rational thought disqualified you as an atheist you’d correctly identify that as gatekeeping and ignore them.
Karma is a bit more complicated. Our experiences are things we get used to and we tend to seek out familiar experiences in the future. We already know what to expect. If our experiences are traumatic then these are kind of like mental wounds and scar tissue. Like all thoughts and feelings they aren’t physically there so if we want to stay in familiar territory we have to recreate them in our lives. Invite the same elements we had in our past into our present and future. So I think we build this sort of karma for ourselves but it utterly lacks any sense of justice that the karma people believe in would have.
While reading the comments and thinking about how to respond I had an interesting thought. I’m interested in psychology but have no formal training nor have I read extensively on the subject. So take this with as much salt as you’d like. As I understand it, feelings are not something we can consciously control. This is why someone is gay or not and that isn’t subject to change, really. You can’t look at someone, decide they’re logically a good choice and then simply decide to feel attracted to them. You also can’t really stop being attracted to someone. You just have to learn something about them that’s unattractive or resolve not to act on it. Attraction doesn’t have an on/off switch and neither does fear or any other feeling.
I tried carrying this idea a bit further and I think one of the main reasons I don’t believe in gods is I don’t have that convenient feeling that the gods are paying attention and going to do something for me. I don’t really feel like they’re anywhere around me. I don’t feel like there’s evidence for them anywhere. When I feel wonder it’s based on the simple existence of the things in front of me. I’m quite comfortable with the cause of my wonder being the things I’m sensing. I don’t require a higher purpose or divinity to be involved. I think fear is similar. You can fear something and it’s your subconscious generating the feeling. You can’t just turn it off but you can find contrary details and try to focus on them. Just feeling something doesn’t have much to do with whether you’re an atheist or not. Everyone feels things. I think belief or lack thereof is tied to whether you consciously invest in those feelings or not. A theist and an atheist can both experience the same events and feelings together but a theist would tend to invest in the feelings that pointed towards a divinity while an atheist in the same situation with the same feelings wouldn’t choose to tie them to a concept of divinity. Like above, I can see something and feel a kind of wonder without “and therefore god”ing the whole thing.
About being okay with murky things… I pretty much am but I don’t think of supernatural ideas as murky. They’re interesting fiction because they seem to resonate with core aspects of who and what we are or can be. Ghosts? A desire to leave some impact on the world after we die. Vampires? Ooh, we get to take predatory, selfish thoughts and dress them up in a more romantic style? Yes, please, make predatory, selfish desires look fashionable. Zombies? Pretty sure we don’t want to be like that, shambling through life with barely a thought and just churning out effort that doesn’t really do anything for us – eating those brains isn’t going to make us smart or happy. Werewolves? Wolves are amazing animals, of course it would be cool to be one. Mix that with a fear that approaching your primal side means giving it more control and you have a compelling legend. And… they’re probably all like that.
Murky to me is the stuff I don’t know enough to understand but just have to accept. Like quantum mechanics or stuff PZ knows about biology that I don’t. It’s not a belief, I’d accept contrary evidence. I just want to have an idea of how the world around me works and being willing to accept some ideas that seem to be built on foundations I can sort of understand helps with that. Blind belief in the supernatural despite a lack of evidence doesn’t.
I’ve bumped into things that I couldn’t explain by science and I think that the main reason I still believe in God. I reject a lot of dogmas traditionally held by some Christians, like misogyny , homophobia , intellectual dumbing down, and non believers automatically being dumped into hell ! I’ve met too many toxic believers and non toxic atheists and non toxic people from other faiths to accept that last one !
I hate the idea of karma. It doesn’t just mean that bad things will happen to bad people, it means that if bad things happen to you then you must be a bad person. You deserve it and no one should help you. If it makes no sense in an accounting of your actual actions then it must be what you did in a previous life. This is how the Indian caste system is justified.
Karma is not the same as saṃsāra, though they are often seen as complementary. But they need not be.
In secular Buddhism karma is simply the concept that actions have consequences beyond the immediate. That acting in kindness makes the recipient or observer of the act somewhat more likely to act in kindness, and acting in a mean way increases the likelihood that they act in mean ways themselves, so one’s actions have some impact on society as a whole. This impact isn’t necessarily huge, but the impact of many small actions accumulates.
I take a Humpty Dumpty approach to karma – it means what I say it means when I say it.
it means that if bad things happen to you then you must be a bad person
Maybe for some people. I find it better to pretend karma is real, and on that basis feel good about doing good things (because I’ll get repaid… never mind whether I actually do or not), and don’t feel unduly guilty when good things happen TO me (because hey, I deserve it). When bad things happen to me (and they do) well… sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
On a practical level as # 2. John Morales has already suggested :
Suggention: surely you can change the circumstances?
The layout, the location, whatever. Something.
You are in control. You can try more than once.
Move the closet. Put it in another room or dismantle it or put sell it on eBay or whatever.
Examine it and see if there’s a real reason why it bothers you & whether something is actually suspect or wrong with it?
Write a note on it to the “ghost / presence” in it asking if you can help it and why it is disturbing you – I actually did this myself as a kid writing just ” ..are you actually there, let me know, can I help you and if so how?” and got no answer FWIW.
Or block off the line of putative line of sight put something else in the way, a mirror so if “it” tries to look at you it just sees its own reflection – or put a Caganer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer ) in its line -o-sight view instead if you can get one from somewhere? You know what part of the Caganer facing its vision Braveheart movie style.. 😉
No fan of JKR & her transphobia at all here but the anti-bogart “Ridikulos!” spell from the Potterverse seems to have some appeal and relevance here, I’d say.. Maybe?